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Her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores.

Little footage, this plot, where it thrived at first, then ghosted away.

When the snake attacked the soldier, its fangs left a violent opening.

When I think on it, I can’t believe I’m going to kill two people over weed.

We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts. This we know.

One said she heard the jazz-band sob when the little dawn was grey.

We’d hit something in the dark which—bang!—was there and gone.

In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.

My mother and I remained apart. My father came late to the party.

She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”

She began to see the word, or traces of it, wherever she went.

Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?

Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.

I waited and waited, rethinking first sentences in my sleep.

The time a man kissed my hand when we met. Though he’s been dead for decades now, I still feel the kiss.

His mother wasn’t there to meet him at his stop. She never was.

You retell the story and I wait for my cues, when to smile, nod.

Love speaks in silence, on behalf of lovers too tired for words.

I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.

Like every thing made, the photograph intimates a view.

My mother is queen of buttons. She shows off the prized ones.

The first skeleton drawn from the earth, they called beautiful.

David Hinton

Flesh is temporary, memory a tilting barn dismantled nail by nail.

On a morning in November words appeared at the end of my pen.

David Lee

You linger in the dimming aftermath, grayer and fainter than a breath.

My soul is simple; it doesn’t think. Something strange paces there now.

Is that coffee you have, or the hell of fusion in your cupped hands?